Twice Dead - Catherine Coulter [2]
She slammed down the receiver. She held it there, hard, as if trying to stanch the bleeding of a wound, as if holding it down would keep him from dialing her again, keep him away from her. Slowly, finally, she backed away from the phone. She heard a wife on the TV soap plead with her husband not to leave her for her younger sister. She walked out onto her small balcony and looked over Central Park, then turned a bit to the right to look at the Metropolitan Museum. Hordes of people, most in shorts, most of them tourists, sat on the steps, reading, laughing, talking, eating hot dogs from the vendor Teodolpho, some of them probably smoking dope, picking pockets. There were two cops on horseback nearby, their horses’ heads pumping up and down, nervous for some reason. The sun blazed down. It was only mid-June, yet the unseasonable heat wave continued unabated. Inside the apartment it was twenty-five degrees cooler. Too cold, at least for her, but she couldn’t get the thermostat to move either up or down.
The phone rang again. She heard it clearly through the half-closed glass door.
She jerked around and nearly fell over the railing. Not that it was unexpected. No, never that, it was just so incongruous set against the normalcy of the scene outside.
She forced herself to look back into her mother’s lovely pastel living room, to the glass table beside the sofa, at the white phone that sat atop that table, ringing, ringing.
She let it ring six more times. Then she knew she had to answer it. It might be about her mother, her very sick mother, who might be dying. But of course she knew it was him. It didn’t matter. Did he know why she even had the phone turned on in the first place? He seemed to know everything else, but he hadn’t said anything about her mother. She knew she had no choice at all. She picked it up on the tenth ring.
“Rebecca, I want you to go out onto your balcony again. Look to where those cops are sitting on their horses. Do it now, Rebecca.”
She laid down the receiver and walked back out onto the balcony, leaving the glass door open behind her. She looked down at the cops. She kept looking. She knew something horrible was going to happen, she knew it, and there was nothing she could do about it but watch and wait. She waited for three minutes. Just when she was beginning to convince herself that the man was trying new and different ways to terrorize her, there was a loud explosion.
She watched both horses rear up wildly. One of the cops went flying. He landed in a bush as thick smoke billowed up, obscuring the scene.
When the smoke cleared a bit, she saw an old bag lady lying on the sidewalk, her market cart in twisted pieces beside her, her few belongings strewn around her. Pieces of paper fluttered down to the sidewalk, now rutted with deep pockmarks. A large bottle of ginger ale was broken, liquid flowing over the old woman’s sneakers. Time seemed to have stopped, then suddenly there was chaos as everyone in view exploded into action. Some people who’d been loitering on the steps of the museum ran toward the old lady.
The cops got there first; the one who’d been thrown from his horse was limping as he ran. They were yelling, waving their arms—at the carnage or the onrushing people, Becca didn’t know. She saw the horses throwing their heads from side to side, their eyes rolling at the smoke, the smell of the explosive. Becca stood there frozen, watching. The old woman didn’t move.
Becca knew she was dead. Her stalker had detonated a bomb and killed that poor old woman. Why? To terrorize her more? She was already so terrified she could hardly function. What did he want now? She’d left Albany, left the governor’s staff with no warning, hadn’t even called to check in.